Is Security Now a Prerequisite for AI Adoption? Inside Cisco's Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA

As companies move from chatbots to agents, the hardest work isn't prompting — it's building an always-on, governable, cost-aware system that leaders can trust. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, Cisco's President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel, NVIDIA Vice President Craig Weinstein and WWT CTO Mike Taylor discuss how Cisco's Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA is designed to close the gap between experimentation and execution by treating AI as infrastructure.

More about this week's guests:

Mike Taylor is the Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Services. He oversees WWT's Global Engineering and IT organization and Services segment to position WWT as a single-source provider to accelerate digital transformation. Mike aligns WWT's unparalleled technical capabilities with its collective business acumen to both advise and execute customers as they seek to become more agile and innovative.

Jeetu Patel is Cisco's President and Chief Product Officer, leading global product vision and strategy. Under his leadership, Cisco has driven innovation across its broad portfolio of products, establishing the company as the critical infrastructure for the AI era. Patel joined Cisco in 2020 to lead the collaboration and security business. He quickly became recognized for his commitment to product design and user experience, leading the team through a period of rapid innovation to transform Webex and support customers through the global pandemic. In 2024 he was promoted to the role of Chief Product Officer, where he now leads several multibillion-dollar categories, including networking, computing, security, Splunk, and more.

Craig Weinstein is the vice president of the America's Partner Organization at NVIDIA. He has over 26 years of experience in sales, sales management and channel leadership. Previously Craig was part of the America's Partner Organization leadership team at Cisco Systems, where he built strong relationships with key decision makers, stakeholders, channel partners, customers and colleagues. Craig holds communications degree from San Diego State University.

The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions. 

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The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.

Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments.